The New York Slave Trade: The City Nobody Calls a Slave City

There is a story about New York City and slavery that the city has been slow to tell itself. The story is this: New York was, for two hundred years, a slave city.

The first enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in sixteen twenty-six, brought by the Dutch West India Company to build the fortifications and clear the land that would make the colony viable. By sixteen forty-four, some of the original enslaved people had been freed on a conditional basis and were farming land in what is now Greenwich Village. The Dutch practice of slavery in New Amsterdam was brutal but somewhat less systematically lethal than the plantation slavery of the southern colonies; the Dutch used enslaved people in skilled trades, in domestic service, and on the docks, and occasionally manumitted individuals after years of service.

The English took New Amsterdam by force in sixteen sixty-four and renamed it New York. Under English rule, New York's slave trade expanded dramatically. The Royal African Company held a monopoly on the English slave trade and used New York harbor as a distribution point for the Atlantic. The city's merchants, many of them among the wealthiest and most prominent families in colonial America, were directly involved in the trade. The de Lancey family, the Livingston family, the Philipse family, all held enslaved people and all benefited from the commerce in them.

By the time of the American Revolution, New York City had the largest enslaved population of any city north of the Mason-Dixon line. More than forty percent of white Manhattan households owned enslaved people. The city's economy ran on their labor through the docks, the households, the skilled trades, the bakeries, the construction sites, and the ships.

New York State passed a gradual emancipation law in seventeen ninety-nine. The children of enslaved mothers born after July fourth of that year would be free, eventually: women at twenty-five, men at twenty-eight. Full abolition did not come until eighteen twenty-seven. The African Burial Ground, with its estimated fifteen to seventeen thousand dead, is the physical measure of what those two centuries of slavery meant. Every name carved into that cemetery's stone, every individual not named but present, is a correction to the story New York preferred to tell about itself.